New York Times Book Review - March 28, 1999
Under the Beds of the Reds Of all the liberal anti-Communists, Jay Lovestone may have been the most feared.
By PAUL BERMAN
------------------------------------------------------------------------ A COVERT LIFE Jay Lovestone: Communist, Anti-Communist, and Spymaster. By Ted Morgan. Illustrated. 402 pp. New York: Random House. $29.95.
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The great untold story of the 20th century, even now, after so many books and memoirs, is the story of the heroic anti-Communist left -- the romance of leftists and radical trade unionists who recognized that Communism was a catastrophic byproduct of their own movement, and who mobilized themselves, before anyone else thought to do so, to bring the Communists down. And in that great untold tale, surely no one played a stranger or more dramatic role than the slightly scary Jay Lovestone, the Machiavelli of Machiavellis.
As Ted Morgan tells us in ''A Covert Life,'' Lovestone (1897-1990) was a sturdy son of City College, the president of the student Socialist club, who abandoned Socialism after World War I to help found America's Communist movement. He was shrewd, confident, talented, energetic and unscrupulous, and by the age of 29 he was the top leader of the country's Communist Party. But there he made a fateful error. During the late 1920's the leaders of Soviet Communism were busily trying to get rid of one another in Moscow, and Lovestone sided with his friend Nikolai I. Bukharin, who lost the battle, instead of with Stalin, who won. Lovestone and his comrades from the United States rushed to Moscow in a heat of factional fury, and Stalin ordered that Lovestone, as an ally of Bukharin, be kept in Russia -- doubtless in order to have him killed at a convenient moment.
But Lovestone got hold of a passport and a plane ticket and escaped with his life, and when he got back to New York he tried to rally America's Communists to side with his own leadership against Stalin's. Naturally, he failed. American Communism was strictly a puppet of the Soviet Union, and Lovestone was duly expelled from his own party. He refused to accept the expulsion, though, and instead organized a tiny faction loyal to himself, known formally and grandiosely as the Communist Party (Majority Group), and informally as the Lovestonites. And he and his followers went on regarding themselves as the legitimate Communists, with Bukharin as their international guide. Lovestone's faction had some strength, too -- two or three brainy intellectuals, some well-placed allies among the old-fashioned labor Socialists and anarchists, and a solid base among the dressmakers of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union.
The Lovestonites were backroom maneuverers. The whole of their strategy was to wait patiently for Bukharin to return to power in Moscow, perhaps at Stalin's side, in the expectation that Bukharin would restore his own comrades to their rightful places at the head of Communist parties around the world. Meanwhile, the Lovestonites did everything they could to keep the mainstream Communists in the United States from taking over the trade unions. They fought a thousand nasty battles. Then, in Moscow in 1938, Bukharin was shot. Lovestone and his comrades gave up on their last illusions about Communism. And from that moment on they devoted themselves to fighting the Soviet Union and Communists everywhere they could, no longer in the interest of achieving a better Communism but in the interest of securing the independence of trade unions.
The battles took place among the needle trades workers of New York and the auto workers of Detroit, where the American Communists had some power. But in the 1940's, with the backing of the garment workers union and the American Federation of Labor, Lovestone and a handful of his followers brought their campaign to Europe. The political situation there was dangerous in the extreme. The Communist parties of Germany, France and Italy came out of World War II with a real strength, especially in the unions, and it was entirely possible that with a few lucky breaks and enough Russian support those parties might come to power, just as Communist parties were doing farther to the east. The United States Government had not yet decided to put up a systematic resistance. The Central Intelligence Agency did not yet exist. And in those circumstances, Lovestone and his righthand man, Irving Brown (the ''scholar pumpernickel,'' as he was called), set up the first effective American effort to undermine the European Communists.
They quietly sought out Socialist and Roman Catholic trade unionists, plus a few shady Marseilles gangster-longshoremen, and supplied them with enough money from the American Federation of Labor to break away from the Communist unions and organize labor federations of their own. Morgan describes those postwar efforts as ''Lovestone's finest hour.'' Doubtless they were. For if Lovestone and his comrades had failed to extend a fraternal solidarity to the European trade unionists, how much stronger would the Communist parties have become? Quite a lot, possibly.
In the late 40's the United States Government did gear up for the cold war, the C.I.A. was organized, and Lovestone's secret agency crossed over into the darker zones of Government conspiracy. He and his network of agents, now all over the world, remained under the official authority of the A.F.L. and then the united A.F.L.-C.I.O., and at the same time were paid on the sly by a probably illegal fund administered by the C.I.A.'s daffy director of counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton. Exactly who controlled Lovestone's activities over the next decades was not always clear. At different times, as Morgan writes, the A.F.L.-C.I.O., the F.B.I. and even the C.I.A. had no idea what Lovestone was up to. Some of his undertakings look attractive enough, in retrospect. During the 1950's, the State Department tended to support the British and French imperialists in their last-ditch efforts to salvage the old European empires around the world. But Lovestone was strictly anticolonialist, notably in regard to North Africa, where he supported Algeria's National Liberation Front against the French.
Then again, he kept up a pointless war against his rivals from the American labor movement, especially Walter Reuther's brother, Victor, who ran an anti-Communist international labor program of his own -- and ran it with a surer instinct than Lovestone for keeping labor's image and ideals intact. During the Vietnam war, the Reuther brothers came to recognize, after a while, that the United States ought to withdraw. But Lovestone was up to his neck in promoting the labor movement in South Vietnam and was incapable of noticing that the war had turned into a disaster. There was always something fanatical about Jay Lovestone. In his eyes, the hour was always late and the time for desperate measures was always at hand. His spying got sillier over time. Still, it's cheering to learn from Morgan that in Lovestone's last years before lapsing into senility, he retained enough independence of mind to sputter with rage when President Ronald Reagan broke the air traffic controller's strike.
Morgan is a popular, not a scholarly, biographer, and there are moments in ''A Covert Life,'' in discussing the arcana of the left and the unions, when he gets out of his depth. He tells us nothing about Lovestonite meddlings in the trade unions of Latin America, where the outcome may have been less than pleasant; and nothing about the Lovestonites in the civil rights movement, where the story was rather honorable. He says almost nothing about the Lovestonites as an intellectual movement. Will Herberg, the Jewish theologian, and Bertram D. Wolfe, the historian, were Lovestonites during the 30's, and they and Lovestone himself gave to their tiny faction a touch of genuine intellectual sophistication. Sidney Hook once told me that Lovestone's faction may have secretly controlled Modern Monthly in the 30's, which preceded Partisan Review as a home for the New York intellectuals. It was the Lovestonites who coined the phrase ''American exceptionalism,'' based on a phrase of Bukharin's, to express their notion that America's labor movement ought to pursue its own course, and not follow any one else's model.
Morgan does tell an amazing tale, though, filled with astounding characters. There is the sensational case of Louise Page Morris, a fashion model from a Boston Brahmin family, who spent 25 years as Lovestone's lover, working for him and for Angleton of the C.I.A. as a secret agent in Iraq and the Middle East -- a woman of real derring-do, who, ever sneaky, merrily two-timed Lovestone with Henry Cabot Lodge, President Dwight D. Eisenhower's envoy to the United Nations. And yet the most sensational of Morgan's characters is plainly Lovestone himself, the conspirator who, ''working behind the scenes and out of the limelight, in an office in the I.L.G.W.U. headquarters in New York,'' became, in Morgan's phrase, ''one of the masterminds of the Cold War.'' He was the man whom Stalin almost nabbed -- the man who just barely got out of Moscow and who, in the name of the American working class, spent the rest of his life exacting revenge, big time, on Stalin and the Soviet Union.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ Paul Berman is the author of ''A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968.''